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The Text Liberation License

Started by John Kirk, February 02, 2023, 03:59:33 PM

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John Kirk

Like most people in our community, the latest debacle with Wizards of the Coast's mishandling of the OGL ticked me off. For the past several years, I've been tinkering with designing an open license, which I call the Text Liberation License (TLL), to release my homebrew RPG under. After I heard about WotC's actions to revoke the OGL 1a, I got off my butt and sent a draft TLL to my lawyer to spruce up with proper legal verbiage. We went back and forth several times over the past month, and we finally got it to a point where we think it's good enough to get public feedback.

I am aware of the Open RPG Creative (ORC) license. This initiative is completely unrelated to that one. I wish them well in their efforts. However, I'd already gotten the ball rolling with the TLL by the time the ORC plans were announced, and I saw no reason to stop what I was doing. And, who knows? Maybe this license will give them some ideas. In any case, I think the community will benefit from having choices. The Open Source community has many open licenses, each of which is tailored to fill a specific role. That is a strength of the Open Source community, not a weakness. After all, the open gaming community has recently experienced the potential catastrophe of becoming too over-reliant on a single license.

I created a new website to host the TLL: homebrew-avenue.org. The site's pretty crude at this point. But, you can download the draft license from there, or you can just use the link at the end of this post. I would appreciate feedback from the community on the TLL, which is why I'm posting to this forum. Once the license is finalized, I plan on releasing a public beta version of the homebrew RPG I've been developing under it.

The Homebrew Avenue website goes into detail about the philosophy behind this new license, and has a FAQ to answer the questions that I currently anticipate concerning it. In short, though, the TLL requires a work licensed under it to have a Text Liberation Date, which can be any date up to 25 years after the work's release date. Prior to the Text Liberation Date, a contributor has exclusive rights to their contributions, during which time they can profit from their creation however they see fit. Once the Text Liberation Date passes, though, the text of the work becomes liberated, allowing anyone to use the text for any purpose, provided it retains the same license. So, it embraces the share-and-share-alike philosophy common to many open content licenses, but it grants a contributor a period of exclusivity on their own contributions before they are freed for anyone's use.

To be clear, I'm not asking for legal advice here. As I said, I've been working with a lawyer to get the TLL in shape (who has done a wonderful job!). Once I get feedback, I'll take any potential changes back to my lawyer to polish the license for a final release. What I'm looking for is feedback on whether there are any glaring holes in the license that we've missed from a usability standpoint, and your general impression concerning it. If you're a homebrewer or a publisher, is this something you'd consider using? If not, why not?

Draft Text Liberation License (version Beta 0.2):  http://homebrew-avenue.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/The-Text-Liberation-License-Beta-0.2-DRAFT.pdf
John Kirk

Check out Homebrew Avenue, home of the Text Liberation License, which is designed for the open content community.

Also, download free gaming materials from legendaryquest.com.

Zelen

That's an interesting idea. I didn't thoroughly read the license document, simply glanced at it.

Here's a general question: How does the TLL handle issues of multiple editions? I assume, for example, if I wrote Rulebook v1.0 under the TLL and set a 25 year time limit, if I produce Rulebook v1.01, 1.02, 1.03, over the course of several years -- when the 25 year limit expires, which version is liberated? Only 1.0?

John Kirk

That's a good question.

Assuming each of the editions has a Text Liberation Date of 25 years from their initial release, then, yes. Twenty-five years after the release of the initial Rulebook 1.0, its text would be liberated. But, anything extra (or modified) in the subsequent Rulebooks wouldn't be liberated until their respective Text Liberation Dates pass.

Of course, it's possible to set the Text Liberation Dates of the subsequent Rulebooks to be earlier than 25 years past their respective release dates. You could, for example, have them coincide with that of the Rulebook v1.0, if you wanted to do that for some reason. But, that's not required.

John Kirk

Check out Homebrew Avenue, home of the Text Liberation License, which is designed for the open content community.

Also, download free gaming materials from legendaryquest.com.

John Kirk

I think my request for feedback may have been a little too broad. So, please allow me to ask a more focused question on an issue that I've gone back and forth on myself.

The TLL contains a clause requiring anyone creating a derivative work from liberated text to remove any trademarks from the work, unless they have express permission to use them. The wording is as follows:

"You must remove any trademarks from Liberated Text that you have used in creating Your Work, unless the owners of those trademarks have given explicit permission to use them."

This is in lieu of a morality clause. Essentially, I was wanting to grant anyone licensing material under the TLL the ability to disassociate themselves from derivative works that they find distasteful, while still allowing creators a great deal of freedom to use the liberated material in their own creations.

For example, suppose a game company, SpiffyCompany, publishes an RPG under the TLL. Let's call it SpiffyGame. Then, another company, RudeCompany, produces a supplement from SpiffyGame's liberated text that SpiffyCompany finds offensive. Let's call it RudeSupplement. SpiffyCompany cannot prevent RudeCompany from publishing RudeSupplement. But, SpiffyCompany can refuse to allow RudeCompany to claim that RudeSupplement is compatible with SpiffyGame. In this way, SpiffyCompany has more control over their SpiffyGame trademark than they otherwise would have had.

This seemed like a reasonable compromise to me. There is a benefit in that potentially more businesses would consider releasing content under the TLL, since they can better protect their brands from what they may consider tarnishing influences. But, it does place a restriction on what downstream creators can do with the liberated content. So, there is a cost as well.

In this case, is the cost too high? Should I remove or alter the provisions giving companies greater control over how their trademarks are used? Or, should the license retain this capability as is?

Any other comments or questions concerning the license are still welcome as well.
John Kirk

Check out Homebrew Avenue, home of the Text Liberation License, which is designed for the open content community.

Also, download free gaming materials from legendaryquest.com.

~

I have some more general questions about the potential problems with open-sourcing and community sharing in general.

If I were to write and self-publish a novel, and attach my novel with this TLL on the idea that I want other smaller writers to be more engaged with my work, couldn't a multinational corporation begin writing several derivative works based on my original with the help of a full-time staff, before I can finish writing a sequel to my first novel?

I've never fully read the OGL and the like due to having never written any game materials myself, but couldn't WotC in theory take anything fan written via an OGL, Creative Commons, or even this TLL contract and begin publishing it for themselves? Couldn't I as an indie game developer get outpaced from the power that kind of company can bring to bear at drowning me out from the market I'm trying to compete in?

I doubt that such a company would even need to bother abstaining from any identifiers as their derivative work being "not Spiffy compatible" if they can make acceptable changes in all of the right places. Especially for game design, you could tweak the probabilities of how level ups, monsters, and damage scale, change the setting, use a different style of prose to explain the rules... a team of good editors could spit out seven adventures lined up to release once per month in a few weeks, all with a higher marketing budget to bring to their disposal and employ statistical modeling to emulate game testing.

Perhaps I'm missing something though...

John Kirk

You bring up a very good point, and are getting to the very core of why I am creating the TLL. It's this central point that distinguishes the TLL from other open licenses, in fact. For the currently available open licenses that I'm aware of, you have summarized the problem I am trying to address admirably.

Once the TLL is finalized, the intent is that content licensed under it will be associated with an explicit Text Liberation Date. The content will not be openly available for anyone to use until after the Text Liberation Date passes. So, suppose you were to license your novel under the TLL, and specified its Text Liberation Date to be 25 years after you released it. In this case, for 25 years, nobody could create a derivative work and publish it without your permission. After 25 years pass, anybody could do so freely, as long as their derivative work is also licensed under the TLL, in a share-and-share-alike fashion. In essence, you'd have a 25-year head start with which to write your sequel.

Does that answer your question?
John Kirk

Check out Homebrew Avenue, home of the Text Liberation License, which is designed for the open content community.

Also, download free gaming materials from legendaryquest.com.

~

Yes absolutely. I was was somewhat concerned by the ability to print parts of the original work, and got my attention pulled hard by that.

That 25 years limit would be very helpful in repelling lazy grifters riding sensations for quick bucks.

What nature of lifting parts of work might be allowed?
If someone else needed to lift a short passage of my work as a flashback to exposit the events in his own work, is that the sort of thing your intending to be permitted?

DocJones

#7
Quote from: ClusterFluster on February 07, 2023, 08:43:43 PM
I've never fully read the OGL and the like due to having never written any game materials myself, but couldn't WotC in theory take anything fan written via an OGL, Creative Commons, or even this TLL contract and begin publishing it for themselves? Couldn't I as an indie game developer get outpaced from the power that kind of company can bring to bear at drowning me out from the market I'm trying to compete in?
If you put your content under the OGL 1.0a then others can use it to create derivatives including WotC.
However using WotC's content under OGL 1.0a does not require you to put your own content under it.

There are several CC licenses and the CC-by-NC ND license allows people to share your content but not allow derivatives or commercial use.



~


John Kirk

Quote from: ClusterFluster on February 08, 2023, 04:46:57 PM
What nature of lifting parts of work might be allowed?
If someone else needed to lift a short passage of my work as a flashback to exposit the events in his own work, is that the sort of thing your intending to be permitted?

Prior to the Text Liberation Date, you retain exclusive rights to your own contributions. The license doesn't say what you can or cannot do with it (other than that you cannot do anything to prevent the text from being liberated on the Text Liberation Date).

So, prior to the Text Liberation Date, if you want to allow someone to use your exclusive content, you are free to do so. But, you'd need to give them permission to do so in some fashion.

After the Text Liberation Date, anyone can make derivative works from the liberated text without needing to ask permission.

DocJones is correct. There are different kinds of open licenses available. Some don't allow derivative works, while others do. Some licenses do not require derivative works to be similarly open in a share-and-share-alike fashion, while others do require it. The details vary from license to license, of course. But, that's the just of it.

All of the currently available open licenses (that I'm aware of) open their content immediately. That is, as soon as you release any content under these licenses, the content is immediately available for anyone to use in the manner specified by the license. If you were to write a novel as open content under any such license that allows for derivative works, anybody could immediately create derivative works from it. And, any such license that allows for commercial use would allow anyone to immediately being selling those derivative works.

For many businesses, that's a big enough problem that they won't even consider publishing anything as open content under these licenses.

That's why I am creating the TLL: to provide an open license alternative that some businesses would find more palatable than the currently open licenses, while still providing homebrewers with the assurance that any content under the TLL will be liberated within a reasonable time-frame.
John Kirk

Check out Homebrew Avenue, home of the Text Liberation License, which is designed for the open content community.

Also, download free gaming materials from legendaryquest.com.

John Kirk

I updated the Text Liberation License to Draft version Beta 0.3. You can download the updated license from:

http://homebrew-avenue.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/The-Text-Liberation-License-Beta-0.3-DRAFT.pdf

There are two changes in this revision, which have passed legal review:

1) The license now explicitly states that content from multiple sources (under the same license) can be mixed. The earlier version implied this, and intended to allow for this possibility. However, I saw a YouTube video covering a law student's PhD thesis about open licenses that stated that any truly open license needs to allow for mixing of content from multiple sources. So, I thought the TTL should be explicit about this point.

2) I removed the clauses requiring trademarks to be removed from liberated text. This was originally added to make the license more attractive from the commercial side of things. I got the idea originally from the OGL 1a, which has a similar clause. But, I have gone back and forth on this issue a number of times. None of the feedback I got was in favor of this feature, and I got some limited pushback on it. In the interest of erring on the side of free speech, I decided to remove it.

All in all, I think the TTL looks pretty good. I am thinking that this will be the final revision. I'm going to wait for a while before making it the official TTL version 1.0 though, to allow for any last-minute feedback from the community. If I don't hear any major criticisms from the community by the end of March 2023, I'll finalize it at that point. So, if you have any feedback, please let me know soon.
John Kirk

Check out Homebrew Avenue, home of the Text Liberation License, which is designed for the open content community.

Also, download free gaming materials from legendaryquest.com.

John Kirk

I am pleased to announce the release of the first official version of the Text Liberation License!

You can download the license from the Homebrew Avenue website, or just use the following link:
The Text Liberation License (version 1.0)

I am planning on releasing Mythmagica under this license in the near future on my http://legendaryquest.com website. Mythmagica is a new RPG that draws from the folklore and mythology of the European and Mediterranean theatres.
John Kirk

Check out Homebrew Avenue, home of the Text Liberation License, which is designed for the open content community.

Also, download free gaming materials from legendaryquest.com.